mchahn

> especially given about half will end in divorce

That ancient statistic is very misleading. It is derived from dividing the number of divorces by the number of marriages. A more interesting statistic is the number of people who get married and then divorced compared to the overall population. This is much lower since some people have a lot of divorces.

I know there is a 99.9% chance that my paranoia is just paranoia, but when I first read this I thought tesla just changed the car's behavior to work better on CR's specific tests. The diesel fiasco has scarred me.

> This is why it's important to have a reliable return process for online shops. Unfortunately, no online store that I know of has one, least of all Amazon,

Huh? I have bought hundreds of items the past year for my small business and returned probably a dozen. I've never had any problem. I can even drop off the item at my local Kohl's and they package the return and ship it at no cost, even if it's my fault for the return.

Edit: I'm talking about Amazon.

> Why bother for the cost and enforcement?

The cost is not a big deal. Spending 10's of thousands for a product earning millions is not a big deal.

However enforcement is ridiculous. One of my patents was for a very unique product idea that no other sane person would come up with. One of our distributors announced an exact copy product.

We called in lawyers and they agreed we had an excellent case. At the end of the meeting they said they'd need a million dollar retainer. It wasn't worth it. We checked and couldn't get a better price.

All in all the experience has spoiled me on the idea of ever patenting anything again.

> I honestly have no idea why it is this way.

Think of an actor coming to hollywood. It's not that different.

The 3X rule assumes a middle-man distributor. When selling direct, as Tesla is, 2X is more common.

I prefer MB and Mb.

I have developed a personal theory that evolution is basically horrible software that has been tested so long it works reliably. It might even be literal when you consider DNA.

Have you ever watched a cat walk up to something and smell it? They purse their lips to use the smell receptors in their mouth.

> In its 15-year run, MiniBooNE has registered a few hundred more electron neutrinos than expected.

Wow. How could this be significant? (Not arguing).

Speaking of physics, I just read The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. The book is about time in physics and the title refers to the fact that is no real ordering of events.

Good read.

If they had locked it a little earlier wgran wouldn't have had the opportunity to report the cause.

I'm a little ticked off at how far I had to read and how much time was wasted before figuring out this was a joke. I guess I'm to blame for how long it took.

> It is also planning a pilot to help tenants reuse so-called grey water - the water from bathroom sinks, showers, baths and washing machines.

So two different sewer systems?

My company had an IO device ATT wanted to support on the 3B2. I got to visit their lab and work with them for a few days. They were a bunch of great guys who really believed in what they were doing.

Does anyone other than me have a cognitive problem with pie menus? For some reason I have to slow down and think about what I should do to use them. I have tried and tried and it doesn't get easy. I use autodesk daily and it offers pie menus everywhere but I avoid them.

Why can't you see an eclipse from a flat-earth?

That would be impressive. I'm not sure, but I think if the north pole was at the center of the flat-earth disc and the disk was spinning on the axis through the north pole you would see the sky rotate around the north pole.

You would see this from anywhere on the disk, which would not be a problem if you never traveled south of the equator (decent assumption for most of the population).

I'm just putting on the flat-earther's hat for fun.

> it wasn’t my use of the term “decentralized”

I apologize. I have a serious problem in forum discussions of not paying attention to who writes each post. I absorb all replies and then reply to the group. My bad. (Edit: And I thought you were the author).

>dismissing a paper on such pedantic terms as you originally did

I never dismissed the paper. Read my first post carefully. I enjoyed it and did read it before commenting. I was just pointing out my shock at the claim, which seemed ridiculous given my understanding.

> you keep escalating this

I thought I was participating in an argument about the meaning of the term "decentralized". I was defending my understanding to multiple people telling me I didn't know what I was talking about.

> Having taken advanced distributed computing courses

I have been working with databases for over 45 years. Most of that time decentralized meant lack of a centralized (single point of failure) computer, not a person or organization. It is only recently (10 to 15 yrs?) that the user meaning has appeared. Please forgive my classic interpretation.

This is most interesting use of scotch tape since graphene was first observed.

> by going out just one whole night and watching the stars rotate around the pole

A flat earth can also spin.

> Might be a good idea to finish the paper now ;).

I did read the entire paper and it was interesting.

You're more specific meaning of the word should have been spelled out before the claim. The meaning that I read was perfectly valid and shared by many others.

A db is either centralized with a master server or not. These definitely work without a master.

The tagline at the github repo at https://github.com/basho/riak is "Riak is a decentralized datastore from Basho Technologies". I don't think they would lie.

Well, the one I use is CouchDB. It is very practical. Others I can think of quickly are CockroachDB, Cassandra, and Riak. And there are many others.

Are you possibly limiting the term decentralized to blockchain DBs? That would be a stretch. Decentralized DBs existed for a long time before blockchains.

It was the claim that no other practical decentralized databases exist that turned me off. If you want I'll name a few.

> a practical decentralized database did not exist before FlureeDB

It was hard to keep reading after this.

> the solution is to protect the resource with a mutex.

Then you have deadlocks.

If I understand the problem correctly it involves generating random strings. If so, then it seems like cheating since quantum effects are random and classical computing isn't.

This garage door opening story reminds me of something that happened in the 50's. The first powerful comm satellites happened to use a frequency that garage doors used (no id codes then). Garage doors opened and closed by themselves. My grandmother had it happen to her.

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